🧭 Cultural concept
Elizabethan theatre & the American Dream
Shakespeare in Love: London’s playhouses around 1600: boy actors, censors, royal patronage — and the birth of plays still performed today. Key question: Where does a great work of art come from?
The Brutalist: The promise that anyone, even a refugee, can build a new life through talent and work — and the price that dream can demand. Key question: Does America give more than it takes?
Film study 8Shakespeare in Love
🧭 Elizabethan theatre
Elizabethan theatre, boy actors, censors and a queen: how Romeo and Juliet might have been born.
Film study 9The Brutalist
🧭 The American Dream
A Holocaust survivor builds a monument for a rich patron: the American Dream and its price.
For the teacher: age ratings
- Shakespeare in Love — R · trailer, stills, synopsis only
- The Brutalist — R · trailer and stills only
Ratings are the US MPA ratings. Full guidance: mode d’emploi professeur.
🪜 Suggested progression
- Shakespeare in Love (2nde→Tle, B1→B2): the concept of Elizabethan theatre; perform the Prologue.
- The Brutalist (1re/Tle, B2): the American Dream; artist and patron.
- Bridge: compare Henslowe and Van Buren — two patrons, two eras.
📅 Shared timeline
- 1558 Elizabeth I becomes Queen.
- 1576 The Theatre opens in London.
- 1593 Plague closes the theatres; Shakespeare in Love is set this year.
- c.1595 Romeo and Juliet.
- 1599 The Globe opens.
- 1660 First recorded professional actress on an English stage.
- 1886 The Statue of Liberty is dedicated in New York Harbor.
- 1919 The Bauhaus opens.
- 1933 The Bauhaus closes; architects emigrate to the USA.
- 1948 Displaced Persons Act.
- 1968 Boston City Hall.
- 1997 Shakespeare’s Globe is rebuilt in London.
📚 Shared vocabulary
| Theatre | playwright · play · stage · rehearsal · audience · groundlings · to perform · a sonnet · a prologue |
|---|---|
| Power over art | patron · commission · censor · licence · to fund · to control |
| Architecture | architect · blueprint · building site · monument · design · scale |
| Dreams | ambition · inspiration · legacy · the American Dream · to start over · refugee |
Sentence starters
- The key word for this theme is… because…
- In both films, the word… applies to…
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Created by Madame Carole Paoli Pompougnac.